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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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While Gary Tandy’s The Rhetoric
of Certitude succeeds in analyzing rhetorical
figures in the non-fiction work of C. S. Lewis, it certainly fails in its
understanding of Lewis’s rhetorical situation. According to Tandy, “The aim of
this study is to examine the rhetoric of Lewis’s nonfiction prose. Rhetoric is
defined broadly to include all the linguistic and literary choices a writer
makes in order to communicate with his audience” (xi–xii). To be fair to
rhetoric, however, this is a very narrow definition of the field. I say
narrow, but to be more accurate, I suppose I should say historically narrow.
Rhetoric, so defined, limits its relevance merely to authorial intent, rather
than exposing the historical values that such rhetorical responses reveal.

Although Tandy writes, “Lewis’s dislike
of chronological snobbery stemmed from his realization that his own age was
also a ‘period’” (9), Tandy rarely allows such knowledge to illuminate his own
study. For example, Tandy writes, “Lewis’s basic distrust of modernity and
preference for older patterns of thought are the threads that run through and
unite his large body of prose work. These central attitudes may be seen as a rhetorical
stance that Lewis adopted in his nonfiction prose in order to communicate
effectively his religious and literary ideas in the modern world” (3). If this
is true, then the most important question seems to be which “older patterns of
thought” Lewis preferred. By Tandy’s own admission, “Lewis would have been in
substantial agreement with two principles regarding language stated by the
nineteenth century thinker Herbert Spencer in his ‘Philosophy of Style’” (31).
In this light, Lewis seems aligned with Hugh Blair on issues of taste or even
more specifically, the sermonizing of Richard Whately. Yet rather than
utilizing the rhetorical theory of Blair or Whately, Tandy turns to classical
rhetoric to analyze Lewis’s thought, “Turning to Lewis’s essays and longer
prose works, we find a variety of structural patterns, many of which fit well
into the classical format” (66). Why Tandy chooses classical rhetoric, rather
than these nineteenth century rhetoricians to illuminate Lewis’s work is
puzzling.

Another example of Tandy not allowing his
own rhetorical research to inform his rhetorical analysis is his treatment of
Lewis’s audience. Tandy writes, “Lewis’s father was a lawyer, and the first
thing that strikes one on opening any of Lewis’s books is that he is always
persuading, always arguing a case. All was forensic; the jury were to be won
over and that was all” (31). Yet two pages later, Tandy writes, “Lewis was also
aware of the effect a writer’s audience can have in determining style. He
notes, for example, that Thomas More wrote ‘for an audience whose education had
for the most part a legal twist, and law is the worst influence on his style’”
(33). If Lewis admittedly critiqued the influence of the legal field on one’s
style, then describing Lewis’s style as juridical seems significant in
deconstructing Lewis’s meaning. In other words, rhetoric is not merely “the
choices Lewis made to communicate with his audience,” but operates as a field
of influence in spite of his authorial intent.

In fact, it seems that Tandy even
contorts Lewis’s rhetoric into the argument that “Lewis did not set out to
write at a particular stylistic level or texture; rather, he maintained that an
author’s style must be molded and modified to meet the needs of his particular
audience” (83). Just a few pages earlier, Tandy had written, “Given Lewis’s
audience and the rhetorical purpose in his religious writings, such informal
diction is not surprising. What not so many critics seem to have noticed,
however, is the extent to which informality remains a quality of Lewis’s prose
when he turns to works of scholarship” (74). Just because Lewis may not have
“molded and modified” his message to “meet the needs of his audience” as much
as Tandy suggests does not make Lewis any less rhetorical than if he had.

What it does illuminate is the particular
historical conception of rhetoric that Lewis utilized. Again, Lewis’s
conception of audience seems more similar to the nineteenth century rhetorical
theory of Blair and Whately rather than a classical conception. Whately himself
was a Christian apologist, and in his Elements of Rhetoric (1828), he
writes, “It is indeed highly expedient to bring forward evidences to establish
the divine origin of Christianity: but it ought to be more carefully kept in
mind than is done by most writers, til some hypothesis should be framed to
account for the origin of Christianity by human means.” One of the problems
here may be Tandy’s source on classical rhetoric. Throughout the book, Tandy
cites the undergraduate textbook, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student for
definitions and analysis, rather than any primary texts. Once again, Tandy
fails to utilize his own argument on the importance of historical period by
choosing definitions that have expressly been modified for a contemporary
audience.

Not only does Tandy seem bent on making
Lewis’s prose fit his argument but also seems to avoid terms that may, in his
mind, diminish Lewis’s influence. In Tandy’s attempt to place Lewis’s style
among the three classical styles—plain, middle, and grand—Tandy writes,
“Although the term, plain style, is an elusive one, critics have often used it
to describe a style characterized by simple diction and sentence structure, one
that avoids for the most part rhetorical figures and highly emotive or elevated
language” (78). However, the most significant part of Tandy’s own study is his
application of rhetorical figures to Lewis’s writing: alliteration (96),
anadiplosis (79,94, 100–101), anaphora (94, 99–100, 108), antanaclasis
(97), antimetabole (94, 101–102, 115, 117), antithesis (79, 94,
99, 106–108, 109,114, 115), aphorism (79, 102–103, 110–112, 114, 117,
123), and that is just the beginning of his admirable and thorough treatment of
rhetorical figures. His treatment, therefore, of the excessive use of
rhetorical figures in Lewis’s writing seems less characteristic of the “plain”
style and much more characteristic of the “middle” classical category, with its
excessive use of figures and its emphasis on charming its readers into
understanding. Rather than this seemingly easy identification, however, Tandy
writes, “Finally, while choosing generally to write in the plain style, Lewis
refused to be enslaved to it and therefore varied his stylistic level and
texture from extreme simplicity to complex and elevated syntactical structures”
(82). Just because Lewis wrote in the “middle” style, does not make his writing
less accessible to mass audiences, as the “plain” style implies. Tandy’s work,
therefore, demonstrates the need for a rhetorical study of Lewis that
contextualizes him with the nineteenth century rhetoric that created him,
rather than classical or a contemporary rhetoric that cannot.

James P. Beasley is Assistant Professor
of English at the University of North Florida.